1 . Cody Wilkins sat on the bench, while his soccer teammates were scoring goals on the field. It had been a(n) ______ high school year for him. He was the only freshman on the team. He most never got to play, and he felt like a______.

“My confidence was shot. I thought maybe I wasn’t as good as my coaches thought I was during tryout. I thought maybe I should ______.” Cody says.

Cody suffered once he discovered he wasn’t a good soccer player. But he ______ to keep going. “The struggle I______made me want to work harder,” he says. “However talented you are, you can always ______ in sports.”

Then Cody took advantage of his ______ on the bench to watch his more skilled and experienced teammates play the game, and by the time he was a junior, he had improved so much that he was ______ captain of his team. He is now a senior and is being ______ to play soccer for several colleges.

If you base your ______just on whether you win or lose, you will never be happy. Winning is always ______ because there is always another ______ waiting for you.

No one is______. But you should learn about your strengths and weaknesses and know how to______ from failure. Once you accept that losing something isn’t the end of your world, you can get on with the business of living your life and learning from it. In the long run, this is _______.